Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Tehran has the last laugh on the Arab streets

As America shapes its Iranian discourse on the flawed logic of Arab’s Persian mistrust, Tehran has the last laugh on the Arab streets, says Saurabh Kumar Shahi

The results can barely be reassuring for those who would like to deem that the Islamic Republic is becoming alienated from its regional neighbours and that Arabs are all set to be on their feet alongside Israelis to shore up military exploits by Israel or the US against Iranian nuclear mark.

Among the respondents, 57% thinks that Iran’s nuclear programme is intended at developing nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, 77% of these exclusively Arab respondents perceive that Iran has the right to follow its nuclear programme; only 20% consent that Iran should be stressed by the global community to discontinue the programme. The figure for the support is up from 53% in 2009.

Ironically, in Egypt and Morocco, two of the Arab countries whom the West perceives as strongly anti-Iran, 81% and 84% respectively consider that Iran is within its sovereign right to do so. Even in Wahabi Saudi Arabia, around half of the population wants Iran to develop such weapons and consider that act rightful. However, the most extraordinary conclusion in this year’s poll is that 57% of the respondents consider that Iran’s attainment of nuclear weapons would be a positive and constructive outcome for the region, whilst merely 21% deem this to be a negative outcome.

This strengthens this magazine’s estimation that however much a few Sunni Arab privileged – and they are not many frankly – might wish to witness Iran being “cut down to size”, there is extremely diminutive popular support for conflict with the Iranian regime on the Arab alleys.

It appears Washington has been building its perceptions about things based on the views of Arab diplomats and so-called experts who have been widely out-of-sync with opinion on the streets. Asked to rank the two nations that pose the principal threat to the Arab world, 88% of the voters named Israel and 77% named the US – the top two scorers on this query, by orders of enormity over any other nation on the globe. Contrary to that, merely 10% Arabs think Iran to be a bigger threat than both these countries. And just to put it in perspective, these polls were not conducted in Syria, Iraq, Qatar and among Gazans and other Palestinians – the groups who are supposed to be pro-Iranian and staunchly anti-American.

And if that was not enough, when asked to name the world leader that they approve of the most, 12% of the Arab respondents named Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It makes him the third most admired leader in the Arab world – after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. “Arab perceptions of the US are shaped principally through the prism of the Arab-Israeli question. And Arab perceptions of Iran are truly the function of perceptions of the US and projection for harmony in the Middle East,” says Hillary Mann Leveret, an Iran watcher based in Washington DC, while talking to B&E.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
 
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